I found a blog called “The Shiksa Blog,” written by a lady named Tori Avey–she did not grow up Jewish but she fell in love with and married an Israeli man and started keeping kosher. Her blog is very funny, and she makes up a lot of her own recipes. One thing I found very interesting that she talked about is that with other types of cooking there are fancy and famous cooking schools that people can go to, and there are classes that teach you how to cook certain types of food but for Kosher food, the way that people really learn how to cook is by watching their mother, their grandmother, their aunts, and sisters. People learn to cook traditional Jewish foods in the kitchen, not in cooking schools.

The funny thing, though, is that I never really “learned” to cook… I never asked my mom to teach me how to cook, she never showed me how to do x, y and z and yet by osmosis, by watching her cook for so many years, I somehow did learn how to cook. I’m not at the point yet where I feel comfortable to experiment much (like on The Shiksa Blog) but I do feel comfortable following recipes and experimenting with some types of foods.